Wow they sure don’t make crises like they used to. In days gone by they used to say that the first you heard of a crisis was when a journalist called you up to find out more details on the reason why one of your employees was drunk when he crashed a company vehicle. Nowadays by the time a journalist has called 40,000 or so people will have seen and shared the twitpic taken by a passer-by of your drunken driver stumbling from the crash.

A true modern digital crisis is currently unfolding for AFL players St Kilda team Capt Nick Riewoldt and teammates Nick Dal Santo and Zac Dawson after a series of naked photos of the players have been posted on the previously unknown Kim Duthie’s Facebook page. As expected the story went viral, very quickly, both in social and traditional mediums.

Following the posting of the first images mainstream media coverage started appearing on 19 December and the media storm continued throughout the day of 20 December. According to Google News there are currently 878 articles on the scandal. I expect this to continue to grow rapidly in the next 48 hours. The graph below highlights the growth of the story.

Facebook has closed down Kim’s page, but it hasn’t stopped her getting her side of the story out. No sooner had her account been closed than she turned her attention to Twitter where she has furiously been posting and responding to tweets throughout the day.

Today, 21 December, the story was a top news item across the nation. She has conducted radio and broadcast interviews, but what is most interesting for me is the way Kim has used traditional media to launch her own content channels, namely Twitter (she has increased her following by 3,359, in the last 24 hours) and most recently Ustream, where she rebutted the tone of the media interviews appearing late today on the validity of the story.

According to some quick research conducted on Tweetreach tweets that mention her Twitter handle have now reached a potential audience of 101,000 people – those are mainstream reach. What you also have to keep in mind is that traditional media have never mentioned her name. So tweets referencing her Twitter handle have solely been because people have sought additional coverage on social media.

To the likely detriment of all involved, the media cycle in this instance will be determined not just by the traditional media, but also by Kim on her own platforms. I have a feeling this story has quite a bit more to run yet.

What can be learned from this from a PR point of view? Below are a few tips from me on managing crisis in the digital age:

1. Monitor the web constantly – the traditional media was tipped off to this story because it appears Kim approached a series of papers with the photos first. There are plenty of cases where this isn’t the case. Monitoring to identify peaks in conversation will ensure you are aware of potential crisis hopefully before it hits the mainstream media.
2. Pre-crisis prepare your messaging – have pre-prepared media statements that can be adapted for media, Facebook, Twitter and launch these quickly. It took St Kilda until around 2.00 pm on 20 December to get a statement up to a story that broke in the last hours of 19 December – too long in the modern hype cycle.
3. Consider a dark site – having a site that can quickly be turned on in times of crisis can be invaluable. During the recent Gulf of Mexico oil disaster BP dedicated their entire home page to the crisis. St Kilda could have befitted from a similar approach. Despite the media statement currently being the top news item you could argue that the media response should be the only thing the St Kilda website is focussed on communicating presently. The decision to post a story about the cheer squad during this scandal is a strange on in my mind. Less strange and just unfortunate is the fact the advertisement featuring Reiwold is still showing on the St Kilda website.
4. Realise that anyone can cause a storm – typically the way a journalist’s enquiries or complaint about an organisation are handled and that of the public is radically different. Until a few days ago Kim was a nobody. Today she is an individual with a series of powerful content platforms and a traditional media following her every move. Treat everybody with a certain level of respect, you never know when an individual will become the next social media megastar – remember United Breaks Guitars?
5. Build it before you need it – it is always tough to build a social presence for response purposes when the crisis has already hit. Also don’t abandon during the crisis. St Kilda has made only made a handful of tweets since the story has broken and have not responded to any questions or messages of support from fans on Twitter or Facebook.

What do you think of the tips above? ? On the whole I think St Kilda and the AFL have done a good job of managing this, so don’t read these as solutions for this particular crisis. More observations and tips in general. Do you have other suggestions?

Wonderbra is causing a stir yet again in the UK, this time with a 3D billboard that builds on the campaign’s origins 16 years ago.

Don’t you hate how often times the most brilliant ideas seem so simple once they are presented to you? Now where are those Avatar glasses?

Full disclosure – my current employer’s UK consumer agency, JCPR, has previously worked for Wonderbra. I am not sure if they are involved in this campaign.

I lifted the image from this DailyMail story.

When I was a kid I surfed every chance I got and still get out regularly now.

Living an hour or so by the bus from the beach though it wasn’t always possible to do the real thing, so me and my mates had to improvise somewhat. We rode our skateboards like surfboards on our driveways; ran up and down the side of storm water drains, pretending we were in the world’s longest barrel; and even lay prone at the bottom of big hills in King Edward Park to see what it would be like to paddle into a 40 foot Waimea Bay monster. We never, ever thought of doing what the cats in this video do though. And more’s the pity – it looks well fun.

Bear with the video until the 30 second mark, that’s where the brilliance begins.

HT Aquabumps for alerting me to the video.

TweetEffect is a tool that I came across today, when trying to analyse what it is that is working from a client’s Twitter feed and what isn’t.

Being an egotist, I of course had to put my results in and was fascinated at what I saw. Generally there was small movements up and down, but there was a few posts that really seemed to shift my users numbers drastically.

The two posts that added most followers was a tweet that referenced social media, and the Black eyed Peas. Whilst Black eyed Peas are no doubt incredibly popular, I bet it was the social media words that made pricked people’s and perhaps more likely a few bots’ attention.

The other post that drove a lot of uplift was one I where I added to the #medievalbumperstickers meme that was going on last week. Though the dramatic drop off a few tweets later suggests this may be that Tiwtter was doing something funky?

What was the most damaging? Mentioning HotHouse’s new digital PR man @ScottRhodie…

Obviously all of this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but interesting regardless.

Posted via web from Matthew Gain’s posterous

via markpollard.net

A very interesting post here from MRM Strategy expert Mark Pollard on the importance of Google insights for planning and measuring brand health and campaign success.

Given the wealth of information available by employing free, or near free measurement tools nowadays I am glad I am not in the research business.

Posted via web from Matthew’s posterous

via prwarrior.typepad.com

An interesting post here from the awfully clever Trevor Young. Whilst I don’t think this will arrest the long term circulation of Playboy it sure has garnered a lot of short term awareness.

Whilst I agree with Trevor’s sentiment generally I don’t necessarily think this is a risk for Playboy. This issue will undoubtedly be a hit on the newsagent racks and will appeal well beyond its fan base. Not that I think PR people shouldn’t be taking risks mind.

Posted via web from Matthew’s posterous

As of last night www.skittles.com is no longer a site controlled by Mars, Skittles manufacturer, but is populated by content generated by the web community.

The Home Page is populated by the results of a search via Twitter for ‘Skittles’, the Products page provides a link to Wikipedia, The Friends page to the Skittles Facebook Fan Page.

The reason why I like this so much is that it reminds the people behind this brand to constantly think about their customers and consumers generally. If the public doesn’t like something Skittles does, it will be right there on its home page for all to see. Of course as the power of the consumer has risen, any mistake was fairly readily accessible for all to see anyways, but I believe this move to relinquish control to the consumer completely will further drive a consumer centred mindset at Mars.

There is a bit of PR stunt feeling about this, but I like it. It will be interesting to see how the people at Mars use the site to tap the insight of the crowd and shape the brand into the future.

As Facebook turns five, should it consider its practice of breaking hearts?

A couple of weeks ago the newspaper headlines declared “Chelsy Davy let the world know that she had broken up with Prince Harry using a thoroughly modern tool: her ‘relationship status’ on social networking site, Facebook.” And in last Sundays Observer, there was a full page story on the very same topic. The author of the Observer article, Georgina Hobbs-Meyes, a 24 year old who has just broken up with her Facebook cheating husband, laments, “once you announce you announce your relationship on Facebook…your love life is on show to all.” Hobbs-Meyer goes on to state that rather than change her relationship status she has opted instead to simply delete it and avoid the “cascade of news through friends’ newsfeeds.”

It was this very cascade of unwanted news and attention that I discussed with George Hopkin and Christian Payne at a recent Social Media Breakfast. When we were chatting, Christian described the flood of consoling messages he received when he changed his relationship status from married to single. The thing is Christian wasn’t breaking up, his wife simply didn’t want to be linked to from his Facebook page, but there was no option to avoid the news cascade.

This is something I have thought about a few times. The smart people at Facebook could come up with a way to change your status without announcing it to your Facebook news feed, so why haven’t they? My theory is that news items announcing relationship changes generate a very high rate of comments, private messages and general page views. All of these mean more time on the Facebook network, which is good news for those trying to sell ads for Facebook (full disclosure – my employer Microsoft is one of the companies that sells ads for Facebook). Is this another case of Facebook putting ad sales ahead of the desires of its users?

Image stolen from here.